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Hometown Jihad
By Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 3, 2006

When I left my hometown of Hilliard, Ohio eleven years ago, it was still a small suburban city outside of Columbus. By the time I returned a few months ago to help care for my aging parents, little did I realize that during the time I was gone that my hometown – about as whitebread, conservative red-state America as you can get – had become one of the many battlegrounds in the Global War on Terror.

The Hilliard I grew up in was sleepy cowtown. As the son of one the local police officers (and my older brother would later follow him on the force), it was impossible to do anything serious without word quickly making its way back to my home, so I didn’t even try. No one else did for that matter. The city was safe and relatively crime-free, except for the obligatory fight at the local bar every Friday night and the annual confiscation of the slot machines at the Moose Lodge. Back then, virtually every area of town was within a half-an-hour walk. While I was in high school, after classes I would walk across the street to the local library at the entrance to the City Park to study and to pass the time.

Today, that former library building is now a full-time Islamic school (K-8), Sunrise Academy, funded and operated by the local-area branch of the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Society of Greater Columbus (ISGC) MAS has been identified by researchers and many media outlets (such as these recent articles in the Chicago Tribune and The Weekly Standard) as one of the U.S. front groups for the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood and funded by the extremist Saudi Wahhabi lobby. Hasan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stated this as the organization’s credo: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” (snip)http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21791